Thanks to a Mumblr blog posting by an Indian management consultant, I recently read the Infosys annual report. Most of the report looks like the average annual report. But tucked in the back, they include what they call an “intangible assets score sheet.” “The score sheet (found on page 135) uses numerical [...]

Business Performance Management magazine recently published an interesting article by Anand Sanwal, about OpEx as Investment. He describes and advocates an approach to managing what he calls “discretionary operating expenses.” These “expenses” include spending on marketing, sales, IT, operations, R&D and innovation.
He shares statistics from the Corporate Portfolio Management Association (CPMA)  that roughly 25-40% of [...]

Paul Krugman’s opinion piece in the New York Times, “Bits, Bands and Books“  talks about one of the paradox of the intangibles economy: to monetize intangibles, it is often necessary to give away part of your offering.
He quotes Esther Dyson who said in 1994 that the digital content products such as software, books, music, and [...]

Business Finance magazine recently reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require that the largest 500 or so companies (by market capitalization) begin to use XBRL by the end of the year with full compliance by 2010.
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a new computer language for the electronic communication of business and [...]

When I read the report in the Wall Street Journal that GE is going to sell its appliance business, I immediately thought of the great piece in last month’s Strategy + Business entitled “Manufacturing’s ‘Make or Break’ Moment.”
GE has been in the appliance business since 1907 and was responsible for many firsts: the refrigerator, room [...]

I recently read two different blog posts on measuring intangible benefits of IT (information technology) projects. The first by Paul Ritchie More On Intangible Benefits and the other by Tabrez Khan A Case for IT’ s Non-financial ROI.
Both bloggers make the case that intangibles are important but very difficult to measure. I agree that they [...]

There was a great post last week on the Empirical Finance Research blog that asked the question: Does the Stock Market Value Intangibles? The post reviews a paper by Alex Edmans at the Wharton School of Business at University of Pennsylvania, which looked at the relationship between employee satisfaction and equity prices.
Edmans concluded that [...]

Innovation is the major strategic challenge for just about every organization today. But it is an elusive goal. This great post by Brad Kolar on his The Question of Leadership blog advises, “Want to innovate? Stop trying to be innovative and start solving problems.” He talks about the fact that successful innovation does [...]

Larry Downes had a great blog post a couple weeks ago on The Writers Strike and the Battle for Virtual Value. Downes points out that the traditional media, with whom the writers were negotiating, have not figured out how to make money on the internet. Nevertheless, he asserts, they spent over $2 billion fighting about [...]

I resolved to start blogging about intangibles when I read a recent article in Fortune about soybeans called, “How Brazil Outfarmed the American Farmer.” The article explained how the Brazilians have used cutting-edge technology and well-designed market networks to become a dominant player in the soybean market. I saw this as just the latest [...]